Drug testing caution

Lincoln Unified trustees are considering mandatory random drug testing for athletes and cheerleaders because of what one administrator calls "a major problem."

Lincoln Unified trustees are considering mandatory random drug testing for athletes and cheerleaders because of what one administrator calls "a major problem."

Under the proposal, students would be required to consent to testing as a condition of participating. Parents of students younger than 18 would have to sign off on the testing.

Why just athletes and cheerleaders? District officials said that of the 219 suspensions in the last three years for drug and alcohol violations, 21 percent involved students in those two activities. District officials didn't present data for such suspensions involving members of the ski or math club or for those working on the student newspaper.

Of course the argument can be made that the drug testing program proposed is aimed at a more vulnerable population, students who participate in activities that put their bodies under considerable stress. But following this logic, don't drugs and alcohol carry the risk of damaging the minds of aspiring mathematicians or writers? Is it more important to protect some students over others?

For his part, district Superintendent Tom Uslan would like to go further, testing "our entire student body."

Thankfully, that isn't possible under a 1995 Supreme Court ruling that allows testing of student athletes because of what the court called their "reduced expectation of privacy."

In dissenting from even that narrowed rule, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor argued that "for most of our constitutional history, mass, suspicionless searches have been generally considered ... unreasonable."

We understand Uslan's concern and his desire to keep drugs and alcohol off his campuses and out of the bodies of his students. This is a never-ending battle with checkered results from even the most aggressive anti-drug efforts.

But what concerns us here is the right to privacy, part of the American legal and social landscape at least since 1890 when Louis Brandeis first articulated the concept in a law review article 26 years before he joined the Supreme Court. He termed it the people's "right to be left alone" by government (privacy rights have expanded greatly over the years, most notably to encompass abortion rights).

This too is was what O'Connor was articulating in her 1995 dissent. It's simply unfair to throw a net over everyone in the hope of catching someone.

If Lincoln Unified officials have evidence a student or group of students is involved in drug or alcohol use on campus or are at school under the influence, act. Otherwise students as all citizens should enjoy "the right to be left alone."